The monster is a key figure in Spanish early modern cultural production, both literary and artistic. It embodies a revolutionary fictional discourse that reflects violence and ugliness, but also freedom and spectacle. Beyond the perverse implications of the abject, the monster has been linked to an excess of imagination and artificial creation from Aristotle to twenty-first-century cloning. Rogelio Minana focuses on three of Miguel de Cervantes? most representative works: the short novel ''El coloquio de los perros,'' the play El rufian dichoso, and the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha. Employing both close readings and monster theory, Minana argues that Cervantes? protagonists--as well as the very discourse that forges them--are monstrous: extreme, beyond the norm, threatening and threatened, spectacular, and fluid in identity, form, and behavior. Cervantes? pervasive discourse of monstrosity ultimately destabilizes fixed meanings and identities as it interrogates biological, social, legal, religious, and aesthetic orders. As extraordinary beings that test the limits of identity and narrative, Minana argues, Cervantine talking monsters ultimately reveal the interpretive and discursive nature of the modern subject.
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